Jakub Korab » thoughts

Tips on the London Eye

Jake — Wed, 06 May 2009 08:42:53 +0000

Pretty much everyone who comes to London goes on to the London Eye. If you want to save yourself some time and money, book tickets online at their website to get a 10% discount, and you get to skip the ticket queue when you turn up to collect your tickets. Great way to save yourself 15 minutes.

The Moustache is Back!

Jake — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:23:06 +0000

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’m growing a Mo. That’s right I’m bringing the moustache back, because I want to help tackle men’s health issues and fight prostate cancer.The Movember rules are simple. I start out on the 1st clean shaven, and for the rest of the month grow the most awesome moustache humanly possible within one month!Here’s where you come in. You help out with a donation to help beat the most common form of cancer among men, and in return on the 30th of October I let you vote on the shape of my upcoming soup-strainer. Here’s where it gets interesting. The higher the total, the bigger the choice. Here’s the breakdown:

£0-500 – Not bad. The tache looks respectable, even pretty good in a pastiche kind of way.
- Errol Flynn/Clark Gable
- Johnny Depp
£501-1000 – Pretty good. Serious face-caterpillar time.
- Borat
- Tom Selleck
£1001-1500 – Now we’re cooking with gas. I either get mistaken for:
- Merv Hughes
- Ron Jeremy
£1501-2000 – Smoking. Getting out the tache comb and wax for some serious swash buckling.
- Salvador Dali
- The “D’Artagnan” – complete with triangular goatee.
£2000+ Facezilla destroys Tokyo!
- General Ambrose Everett Burnside

But wait! There’s more!
Every day in Movember I’ll take a photo of the tache progression, and animate it so you can see the magic happen in internet time at the end.
As you can see, every little bit helps. So you get to have a bit of a laugh for a month and get to feel good for helping out with a great cause. “But Jake? How do I get in on this sweet deal?” I hear you say. It’s real easy…

Go to https://www.movember.com/uk/donate and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account.
Email me at jakekemail-movember at yahoo dot com dot au.

I will then add you to the “special” mailing list that lets you… Pimp My Face.
The money raised by Movember is donated to the good people at The Prostate Cancer Charity which will have an enormous impact on many men’s lives, and the awareness will help us to fight prostate cancer on every front – through research, support, information and campaigning.

Did you know…

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. 35,000 men are diagnosed every year and one man dies every hour.
1 in 11 UK men will be diagnosed in their lifetime .

For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the details at:
[ Fundraising Outcomes ].

Movember culminates at the end of month Gala Partés. If you would like to be part of this great night you’ll need to purchase a [Gala Parté Ticket].

And if you want to link back to this blog, that would be cool too.

Conference organizing no more

Jake — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:26:51 +0000

After taking a step back to have a think about my situation, I have regretfully pulled out of organizing the IJTC conference in Dublin this year. Putting together a conference is a hugely involved activity and I just do not have the time to spare on it this year. I wish the remaining organizers the best of luck and hope the event works out to be a success.

Irish Java Technologies Conference 2008

Jake — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:57:35 +0000

It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up, but the crux of it will be around addressing common problems and how the tools can help to support that effort, rather than being a bog-standard tech showcase. It’s kind of a reverse point of view from what other other events take.

It was a great buzz putting it all together last year, and I know this one’s going to be even more fun, both for the delegates and speakers. We already have our scheming hats on

Who reads your blog?

Jake — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:33:35 +0000

So, why no blog posts lately? Most of the interesting stuff that folks blog about are those issues and ideas which have currency, those at the forefront at their minds. Tech blogs too deal with the everyday. Issues that we have come across, interesting ideas, problems and techniques. However, in this day of corporate non-disclosure agreements and overly keen security departments sometimes it’s just not prudent to scratch that blogging itch, regardless of how tangential the topic might be.

On the flipside, if you didn’t know, Eclipse 3.4 aka Ganymede is out! With a whole bunch of new goodies as standard. After my first cursory test drive, the concensus is… very nice.

Teenage Knife Crime in London

admin — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:52:52 +0000

An unfortunately pessimistic, yet topical, post this time. You only have to walk past the news stands any given day to see the topic of the month. Knife crime is increasing, with the victims typically being teenagers. What were a couple of isolated incidents now appear to be accelerating into a sustained trend. Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point would not be surprised to see the similarities between the case studies described, and what’s going on. Ironically, bringing media attention to the issue, and staging marches in unity against knife crime only serves to validate this behaviour as an appropriate way to resolve disputes. Seeing one’s peers behaving in a particular way serves to validate that behaviour as an acceptable form of expression. The current trend will only be stopped by applying lessons from past equivalents. In the meantime, we can unfortunately expect it to accelerate.

The Long Tail of Java Tools

Jake — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:40:44 +0000

I went to an awesome session yesterday evening that did a rapid fire listing of small tools that you should know about if you are working with Java. The breakdown is on the Dublin JUG site.

Dynamic Language Smackdown

Jake — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:49:50 +0000

I just came out of a session comparing scripting (but probably better described as dynamic) languages. Groovy, Ruby, Python and Scala went head to head in three rounds; desktop app, web app and freestyle. Whatever language you follow, the possibilities for use are awesome with excellent features in each language ecosystem. While each compile down to Java bytecode Groovy really does provide developers with the most natural integration, Ruby has awesome libraries, and Scala’s concurrent programming model is compelling (and will probably be one I will be following up). The diversity in this space is awesome and Java developers really should keep abreast of developments in this area. The ease with which web apps in particular are developed in all three leave traditional frameworks in the dust.

Keynote Trends

Jake — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:51:04 +0000

Keynote was great. These things are really about getting excitement about the technology going, and it certainly succeeded. The big news really is JavaFX at the moment. The runtime will start to be distributed via the Java 6 Update 10 (J6u10 from here) formerly spoken of as the consumer JRE. Having given Flex a good kick of the tires, I’m really excited about JFX. It’s the possibilities of writing Rich UIs that run universally in a browser that you can detach and run as a desktop application, for which you can take the same code and run it on a mobile platform – JME, Android (looking forward to finding out what that’s about) etc. or on a PS3. Very, very cool stuff. The JFX media framework is awesome – 3D rendering, high definition video, high def sound. Makes for an amazingly impressive demo. I was talking the day before to a couple of guys about the capabilities of the various RichUI techs – Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX. The latter seemed an also ran, but with stable implementations coming out in the coming months, I’m not sure that our conclusions of still stand.

App server modularity is the trend of the moment. The new Glassfish container is 98kb! Makes for an interesting idea – what is the app server, and where is it? When a server can run on a mobile, what are the new possibilities? How does this change things? I don’t know, but it bears thinking about as it is definitely the trend forward. Glassfish, Geronimo, JBoss, now Spring App Server. The monolithic server’s days are numbered.

T-shirts galore, plenty of cool ideas floating, some half-assed ones. Body count: 1 broken camera, 1 dead laptop battery and 1 lost power adapter. Day 2 ahead!

Twittering JavaOne

Jake — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:19:46 +0000

If anyone’s interested, you can follow my exploits on via Twitter on jakekorab.